I'd Know You Anywhere, by Laura Lippman

I'd Know You Anywhere, one of Laura Lippman's stand-alone novels (she also writes the Tess Monaghan mystery series), is a psychological thriller that finds its tension in the interplay between a woman and the man who kidnapped and raped her 20 years earlier.

Eliza Benedict and her family have just moved to the DC suburbs after six years in London when she receives a letter from Walter Bowman, the man who kidnapped her, held her captive for 40 days, and raped her when she was a 15-year-old known as Elizabeth Lerner. Bowman, who is soon to be executed for a murder that occurred while he was holding Elizabeth, wants to talk to Eliza. Understandably, Eliza, who has spent years trying to stay out of the spotlight, is at first resistant. But over time Walter and a rather strange anti-death penalty activist named Barbara LaFortuny wear her down. Believing Walter is going to confess to other unsolved murders, Eliza agrees to meet with him. Meanwhile, Walter has a plan to get Eliza to recant the testimony that helped convict him. As these events progress, Lippman fills in the back story, providing details of Eliza and Walter's early lives and the crime that linked them.

While this book is certainly not the most nerve-wracking thriller I've ever read, it is an interesting look into one criminal's mind and the impact of crime on victims and their families.

Favorite passages:

She imagined her body covered with little Post-its, each one marking a specific area of decline--the creaking knee, the popping hip, the stiffening shoulder. She pictured a suit of Post-its, sharp yellow edges riffling in the breeze, at once stiff and pliant. She would like such a suit, an outfit that would announce her edges to the world.

She was appalled that Iso was one of those popular girls who derived power by excluding others. But, still--was this grounds for suspension? Children needed a little grit in their lives, environments that fell somewhere between velvet-lined egg crates and Lord of the Flies.

Getting to Happy, by Terry McMillan

When Waiting to Exhale was published in the early 1990s, I enjoyed the story of four African-American thirty-somethings who were "casualties of love" (perhaps because, at the time, I was in the process of getting divorced and shared their views on the generally dog-like nature of men--and the book was funny). So I had some hope that Terry McMillan's return to the four friends--Savannah, Bernie, Robin, and Gloria--would be equally resonant with my now 60-year-old self. Unfortunately, I found it more soap operatic than insightful.

Each of the women, now about 50 (the book is set in 2005, apparently so the women can be appalled by and responsive to Hurricane Katrina), has a problem. Savannah, married for 10 years to a contractor, is bored in her marriage and angry that her husband has an apparent porn addiction. Bernie, betrayed by her second husband, pops tranquilizers and sleeping pills. Robin, a single mom with a boring career in insurance, has a shopping addiction. And Gloria's world is shattered when her husband Marvin is an innocent victim of a gang shoot-out.

Not much really happens as the women try to find their way to happiness that is less rooted in men than in self-realization, and their experiences don't add anything new to my understanding of what makes a rewarding life. While McMillan is a competent writer, the fact that the chapters from two of the women's perspective are written in first person and two in third annoyed me (I don't remember whether Waiting to Exhale was written similarly).

Favorite passage: None

World and Town, by Gish Jen

Hattie Kong is a in her late 60s, living in a small New England town where she has retreated following the death of her husband and best friend (whose sarcastic voice rings in Hattie's head) and her retirement as a public school teacher. She was born in China to a Chinese father and American missionary mother and was sent to her mother's family in Iowa at age 17 because of the danger posed by Mao's revolution. Ever since, she has felt like an outsider, a feeling reinforced by the betrayal of her first love, Carter Hatch, when she was trying to establish herself as a research scientist.

Sad and lonely, Hattie becomes interested in the family of Cambodian refugees who have recently moved in down the hill from her. The family is clearly struggling, and Hattie reaches out to help them, but her help is met with varying degrees of acceptance. At first she is most successful with teenage daughter Sophy (we later learn two other daughters are in foster care in another state), to whom Hattie offers Chinese lessons, cookies, and a dog. But Hattie is not the only one who takes an interest in the girl; Ginny, a member of an evangelical church, targets Sophy and the community cum family that the church offers appeals to the girl, whose own family is struggling. Meanwhile, Ginny has left her husband Everett, who is not taking it well. Sophy's brother is expected of terrorism in the wake of 9/11. And Carter Hatch has moved to Hattie's town.

While my description makes World and Town sound like a soap opera, it's actually much more. Told from the perspectives of Hattie, Sophy, and Everett, the story is an exploration of family and community--of what it means to belong. While Hattie gets more "air time" than the other narrators, all three are rich characters that the reader cares deeply about.

Recently, I seem to be finding a lot of books too long--and this one was no exception. The first 350 pages drew me along, while I felt like I was slogging through the last 30, only to find the ending just a bit too pat.

Despite my misgivings about the ending, I enjoyed the book, the characterizations, and the dark wit with which Jen infuses the story.

Favorite passages:

A call! Will everything involving her child remain an event forever?

In what you are proud of, Lee used to say, you can see in what way you are nuts.

By Nightfall, by Michael Cunningham

Late in By Nightfall, gallery owner Peter Harris and his brother-in-law Mizzy (short for "The Mistake," because he came along nearly 20 years after his three sisters) enter a client's home, described as "a perfect imitation of itself." Peter, the protagonist of Cunningham's new novel, might be similarly labeled. Peter appears to be a happy 44-year-old with an art gallery, a loft in Soho that is a "great space" bought before real estate prices skyrocketed, an accomplished wife Rebecca, a problem daughter, and a large social circle. But unhappiness is Peter's "realm," and the happy facade is just that...a facade.

Peter wants to be deeply moved by the art he sells, but representing artists who produce foul-smelling installations made of glue and horsehair or paintings displayed in brown wrapping paper is not rewarding. Thus, perhaps we should not be surprised when Peter feels himself drawn to Mizzy. Mizzy is an aimless twenty-something with a drug habit, but he also has a "pale, princely beauty." How Peter decides to handle his feelings is somewhat startling, however.

Most of the book takes place in Peter's head--with forays into his childhood in Milwaukee, his brother's death of AIDS in the 1980s, the first time he met Rebecca's family, and other seminal events. In the present, the book takes place over just a few days while Mizzy is staying with the couple. As readers, we come to know Peter well--and, although it's hard to actually like him, I could empathize with his angst about his career, his marriage, his role as a father. Rebecca and Mizzy we know less well, of course, and yet the "surprises" that they spring on Peter at the end of the book seem not exactly predictable, but logical within the way their relationships with Peter are depicted.

As with all Cunningham's novels, there are many literary references--Gatsby and Death in Venice prominent among them--but they are not as central to the book as Mrs. Dalloway was to The Hours or Whitman's work was to Specimen Days. Here visual arts assume a central role; fortunately, you do not need sophisticated knowledge of modern art to understand Peter's ruminations on beauty, creativity, and significance. While the construction of the novel is perhaps not as complex as either of those earlier Cunningham works, the writing is just as beautiful. As a character study and an examination of how a person might be affected by the lack of beauty in his/her life, By Nightfall is successful.

Favorite passages:

Peter has gotten better over the years at dressing as the man who's impersonating the man he actually is. Still, there are days when he can't shake the feeling that he's gotten it wrong. And of course it's grotesque to care about how you look, yet almost impossible not to.

Here is the terrible, cleansing fire. Peter has been too long in mourning, for the people who've disappeared, for the sense of dangerous inspiration his life refuses to provide.

They do, of course, each of them, carry within them a jewel of self, not just the wounds and the hopes but an innerness, what Beethoven might have called the soul, that self-ember we carry, the simple fact of aliveness, all snarled up with dream and memory but other than dream and memory, other than the moment (crossing a street, leaving a bakery); that minor infinitude, the private universe in which you have always been and will always be buzzing along on a skate board or looking or coins in the bottom of your purse or going home with your fussing children. What did Shakespeare say? Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.

The Map of True Places, by Brunonia Barry

Zee (short for Hepzibah) Finch is a successful psychotherapist in Boston, preparing to marry a very eligible bachelor she was fixed up with by her mentor, Dr. Liz Mattei. But then a patient commits suicide, shaking Zee badly (the similarities with her mother's suicide many years earlier contribute to her debilitating sense of responsibility for the suicide). She attends the funeral, rationalizing that going to Lynn will also allow her to stop in Salem and check in on her father, who has Parkinson's.

When she arrives in Salem, she finds things a mess. Her father has slipped into a delusion that he is Nathaniel Hawthorne and is selling his former life partner's belongings out the window of his home (which he believes is a "cent-shop"). Zee feels compelled to stay, first until she can convince the erstwhile partner Melville to return and then, when that doesn't work out, until she can make a workable plan for her father. The bulk of the book is the story of her summer in Salem, with a rapidly deteriorating father, sad memories of her mother, a stalker who is the dead patient's former lover, and a variety of other complications.

It is sometimes hard to believe that Zee is a therapist--her insight into her self and others does not appear to be keen. However, late in the story, she recognizes that her mother and patient's greatest similarity was that they lied to her and that "The lies or stories that Maureen and Lilly told were not lies they were telling Zee, they were the mythology they were creating for themselves. When they were no longer able to believe their own fairy tales, they lost all hope." This insight helps her find some peace--but Barry is not going to let her off that easily. There will be a violent climax.

At heart, Barry is a romantic, and she tacks on a prologue that wraps up Zee's story with happy ribbons. For me, it wasn't very believable--perhaps an ending that had Zee more fully unraveling her own mythology might have been just as happy and not so saccharine. Still, the book is an enjoyable weekend read.

Favorite passage:

Zee hated tunnels--the darkness, the damp, the dripping from overhead, where she imagined he weight of water already pushing through the cracks, finding any weak spot and working its way through.

(Exactly how I feel about tunnels!)

As Husbands Go, by Susan Isaacs

In her work, Susan Isaacs has frequently combined humor with mystery. She creates quirky characters, throws in a murder, and puts the quirky characters through a variety of humorous situations en route to solving the murder. Sometimes, the formula works. In As Husbands Go, it doesn't.

Oh, the quirky characters, the murder, and the humorous situations are all there. The main character is Susie B. Anthony Rabinowitz Gersten (even her name is quirky), a Long Island floral designer with four-year-old triplets and a plastic surgeon husband "true by nature." Then husband Jonah is found dead in the apartment of prostitute Dorinda Dillon, and Susie is forced to consider whether she knew her husband at all.

When Dorinda is arrested, Susie is not convinced of her guilt and she sets about investigating the case with the assistance of her grandmother, who has recently become a presence in her life for the first time. (The grandmother is another character with quirks to the max--as is Susie's mother, although mom's quirks are much less interesting that grandma's.) As an example of an event intended to be amusing, Susie assumes her grandmother's identity to interview Dorinda.

For me, the quirks and humorous events didn't mix well with Susie's grief and the challenges she and her children face (the children are remarkably unpresent except when convenient--evidently the twin au pairs do a good job of keeping the kids out of mom's hair) . Perhaps if the murder victim were not so close to the protagonist (if he were, for example, the neighborhood periodontist), the humor would be more effective. As is, however, it feels misplaced. Furthermore, when Susie does figure out the real story behind her husband's murder, the book just fizzles out, with neither humor nor any resolution of the emotional issues she is facing.

Favorite passage:

Life goes on, toots, whether you like the way it goes or not. The best a girl can do is mind her ethics--and eat a nice lunch.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga

The White Tiger is the story of class and conflict in India, told in a long letter from Balram Halwai, a former driver who we learn early on has become an entrepreneur by murdering his former boss, to the Premier of China Wen Jiabao, who is visiting India as Balram is writing. Author Adiga creates a unique voice for Balram, a combination of innocence, wry insight, and anger, and gives him an interesting story to tell.

Balram's story begins in the village of Laxmangarh, where he grows up as the son of a rickshaw-puller and starts his own working career in a tea shop. Through good luck and craftiness, Balram becomes a servant in the home of one of the three wealthy men in the village. Eventually, he works his way "up" to become a driver and moves with one of the sons of the family to Delhi. The son, Ashok, seems to be living in Delhi for the sole purpose of handling the family's bribes to government officials.

Meanwhile, Balram and the other drivers live lives of servitude, squalor, and boredom. On one particularly terrible night, Ashok's drunken wife of puts Balram out of the car and drives off, leaving him stranded. She doubles back to pick him up, but then hits a child in the road. Ashok's family insists that Balram take responsibility for the accident. It is not difficult to see why Balram starts to consider how he might escape from the servant's life.

The book provides one perspective on India--and, despite the book's comic moments, it's a dark vision of a corrupt society marred by class distinctions. The character of Balram is engaging--but every other character is either laughable or despicable or both. Still, I found myself very interested in Balram's tale until about the last 75 pages, when the story seemed to break down.

Would I have given the book the Man Booker Prize for 2008 (which it won)? No. But would I recommend the book to others? Yes, it's worth reading for its take on India, its dark humor, and its winning central character, even if I found the last quarter of the book disappointing.

Favorite passage:

The road was dead--then two cars went by, one behind the other, their headlights making a continuous ripple on the leaves, like you see on the branches of trees that grow by a lake. How many thousands of such beautiful things there must be to see in Delhi. If you were just free to go wherever you wanted, and do whatever you wanted.

At night I lay in my mosquito net, the lightbulb on in my room, and watched the dark roaches crawling on top of the net, their antennae quivering and trembling, like bits of my own nerves: and I lay in bed, too agitated even to reach out and crush them.